mousemode

Description

A dead-simple, reliable keyboard interface for moving the mouse cursor and pressing buttons. When the program is executed, mousemode will:

1. allow you to use vim or arrow keys to move the mouse cursor
2. holding "c" will greatly decrease cursor speed
3. holding "f" will double the speed (can be combined with "c")
4. [a,s,d] keys correspond to left, middle and right mouse buttons
5. [e, y] keys correspond to scroll wheel down and up
6. "q" exits the program

During execution, all unmapped keys should behave as though mousemode is not running, including adding modifiers to the mapped keys.

mousemode is aimed at laptop power users that are annoyed with touchpads or people that in general find themselves in a position uncomfortable to be using the mouse via conventional means. The "f" and "c" keybindings feel a bit strange at first, but I wanted to avoid standard modifiers like shift and control, because some programs have shortcuts with those (for example vim, if you enable the mouse feature, selects differently when you hold shift).

Many similar programs to mousemode will lock the entire keyboard when active. mousemode only locks what is absolutely necessary, because it is targeted at people with keyboard-driven workflows, who often use global keyboard shortcuts to switch around windows, workspaces, etc. Once you memorize all the keys, you're in charge.

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mousemode does NOT use Xlib events. In fact, by nature it does not distinguish between key presses and releases. Instead, it reads the keyboard state 60 times a second and emulates mouse clicks/movement accordingly. This synchronous nature allows it to be very simple and reliable (only about 120 lines of code).

Installation

For arch users, you can install the AUR package mousemode-git. If you're not an arch user, the building process is very straight forward.

Building

You should only need Xlib, which is widely available on virtually all linux distributions. You very likely already have it installed!

Run the following (if necessary, as root):

make install

The resulting binary will be installed at /usr/local/bin/mousemode.